Field of the Invention
This invention pertains in general to computer security, and more specifically to sampling and tracking performance problems caused by applications on mobile devices.
Description of the Related Art
Mobile devices are showing an astounding growth in both enterprise and consumer markets. They are used for a wide variety of functions including making phone calls, receiving/sending electronic mail, taking photos, managing a calendar, mapping out geographic destinations, and many others purposes. Software vendors are constantly coming out with new or improved applications for mobile devices. These applications further expand the functionality of mobile devices, allowing users to perform new tasks on these devices, and making them nearly indispensable to many users.
With the continuing growth and popularity of mobile devices and their applications come a number of problems. Users running multiple different applications on their phones sometimes experience a variety of performance issues. These problems include slow device performance, excessively quick battery drain, or other issues that cause a negative user experience. Similarly, certain mobile devices can consume a disproportionately large amount of network resources or bandwidth, or can otherwise cause anomalous or problematic network traffic. Thus, these mobile devices can disrupt not only their users, but can negatively impact the entire network.
Certain ill-behaved mobile applications are often the cause of these types of performance issues. While mobile service providers may be able to trace the network problems to an individual mobile device, or at least recognize anomalous traffic usage in specific geographic areas or time frames, they generally cannot trace the problems to the particular mobile application causing these problems. Thus, they have no way to warn users of certain applications or otherwise prevent these applications from disrupting mobile device usage. Similarly, any type of tool for profiling mobile devices can itself impact performance and battery life.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for a solution that samples and identifies ill-behaved applications for performance and network profiling without itself unduly impacting the mobile device performance.